I'm not sure what you mean but a year ago or so I regularly sent zero fee transactions without any problem. Later the minimum fee was needed and now I mostly pay 5 times that high for a fast inclusing. There definitely changed something. And that is nothing that needs a spam attack on the network anymore.
I never sent a transaction without a fee, nor would I. As was demonstrated last year, it is easy to spam the network with such transaction. The minimum fee makes this attack more 'expensive'. Nothing in life is free, deal with it.And the current $0.10 fee per transaction are double the amount it was some months ago.
You're telling me I need to pay 10 cents to make a transaction? Wow, this is really a expensive system! 
I wish you would apply simply logic. Since when the amount of transactions is constantly rising but the amount of transactions being able to include in a block in a certain timeframe stays the same... then this is an unavoidable thing to happen without a mayor change. I won't even say "mark my words and see how it goes in 6 or 12 months. I doubt that segwit can make a mayor change till then. But maybe segwit surprises me. 
Logic which you lack. It is a self regulating cycle: fees rise -> people who can't afford it leave -> fees lower -> people join. There is no doomsday scenario and a 2 MB block size limit fixes nothing.